http://www.politifact.com/florida/s...sh-says-isis-didnt-exist-when-my-brother-was/
spokesman for Bush’s political action committee pointed to a 2014
op-ed by Ali Khedery, who served as senior adviser to three heads of US Central Command from 2003-10.
It starts by saying, "Three years ago, the
Islamic State (ISIS) did not exist; now it controls vast swaths of Syria and Iraq."
Technically, yes, a group with the name "ISIS" did not exist under President Bush.
The group’s roots, however, trace back to 2004.
"There were evolutions that took place with some of the name changes," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In 2004, long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi established Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to the National Counterterrorism Center.
After he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, the group was renamed the Islamic State of Iraq.
...
The Congressional Research Service wrote in August 2008 that U.S. officials concluded that al-Qaida in Iraq was "weakened almost to the point of outright defeat in Iraq, although they say it remains lethal and has the potential to revive in Iraq."
The surge under Bush was successful -- the attacks al-Qaida was carrying out had significantly declined by January 2009 when Bush left office.
"Literally everybody viewed this as a defeat for ISIS," Gartenstein-Ross said. "When I say everybody I mean al-Qaida included. They viewed this as a major defeat to its brand."
A spokesman for Jeb Bush pointed to several articles that noted how the group was weakened, including a
Washington Post article that stated that in 2009 "the power of the Islamist militancy in Iraq was at its lowest ebb, and the number of killings had
plunged."
In 2010,
Vice President Joe Biden declared success in Iraq. When the combat mission ends, he said the administration "will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’"
But three factors led the group to a comeback: the Syrian war, the Iraqi government ruled in a sectarian way that alienated Sunnis, and the U.S. withdrew troops.
